As the Internet and World Wide Web become ever more widely accepted, designers who organize information for visual display increasingly approach the layout of screen display objects with certain predispositions favorable to standard Internet technology. In particular, a standard approach for specifying the locations of screen display objects on a display screen has evolved—each screen display object is enclosed by a rectangle, and the location of the screen display object is specified by spatial coordinates of the rectangle relative to the display screen.
The task of translating fixed position content with spatial coordinates to DHTML layered content is straightforward when a designer uses an advanced web-based language such as Dynamic HyperText Markup Language (DHTML). Unfortunately, this kind of translation has several disadvantages and limitations. One limitation is that DHTML is not universally accessible to all kinds of display terminals. For example, wireless devices such as hand-held communication terminals generally cannot read DHTML. Moreover, accessibility may be hampered by the complex DHTML layering. Also, consistency is lacking, as a DHTML browser may operate differently on two different platforms, and DHTML content may differ significantly between versions of a browser.
Thus there is a need for transforming the spatial coordinates of fixed-position screen display objects into a form that wireless devices can access without heroic manipulations, a form that provides consistency so a wide range of web browsers may be successfully used, and a form that provides universality so that different DHTML code need not be written for each browser version.